Comics : Cinebook Recounts 2 : The Falklands War

To someone like myself who remembers the Falklands War of 1982 very vividly (maybe the most abiding TV memory of my childhood) a graphic novel telling the story of that war at first appears very strange. But then again graphic novels of WW2 seem fine and for some people they were vivid memories too so why not?

And indeed this is a very beautiful piece of work with excellent artwork. To fit the whole conflict into the confines of one volume was difficult i bet and at times the story races along at breakneck speed and also puts somewhat odd speech into the "characters'" mouths in order to advance the narrative sufficiently. I did notice a couple of inaccuracies with the events portrayed here but something only a military or history geek would really pick up on.

This is a very good piece of work, it should be required reading for British children to see how a British colony was regained nearly 30 years ago despite great difficulties and great cost.

2011 building over

The outhouse where i build my model planes is unheated and thus is too cold really from November to about March. Therefore like last year i have decided to call a halt to building kits and wait until it warms up a bit! As a final act after a lot of hard gluing and painting i collected all the projects built in 2011 together for this photo.

TOTP (21/10/1976)

Ed Stewart is here to run us through the hottest pop sounds...

Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel - love is a prima donna
Steve is in a rather fetching red suit, the song itself grooves along fairly inoffensively but then moves into a rather higher gear and some lovely guitar work Ed appreciates.

There is a competition tonight, get a pen and paper ready.

Demis Roussos - when forever has gone
The warbling big man is dressed as Moses and still has a fantastic big beard. A song that probably works at the end of a long night in a Mediterranean bar but maybe not so much here...

Ed has a couple of sailor girls with him, daughters of a couple of Beverley Sisters apparently. I’d rather look at them than...

Paul Nicholas - dancing with the captain
Paul has gone for a bowler hat and white jacket look which is not very nautical. It doesn’t change my enjoyment of this song though. SFX alert! Overlay of some water moving about while Paul tries to get people to clap. Ah good its ended.

Rod Stewart - sailing
Rod walks around a boat looking moody. We get to see some film of Britain’s sea power too. Little did people know watching this that the Tories were soon to get back in power and gut the Royal Navy, of course that couldn’t happen these days.

Ed is a thorn along six roses... the new TOTP dancers infact and the audience are invited to give them a name. I suggest... er... Legs & Co. Do i win?

John Miles - remember yesterday
At the old joanna for a rather generic but not unpleasant late 70s pop-rock song.

The as-yet unnamed new dancers are here to dance seductively to the Average White Band’s “queen of my soul”. Well parade around in flowing dresses anyway on a star shaped stage, very age of Aquarius. One of the dancers looks like my art teacher at secondary school (in the 80s), couldn’t have been? Could it? I hope it was.

Climax Blues Band - couldn’t get it right
SFX overload takes us into a mass of flares and long hair. Nice understated cool feel to this.

Whats this, Joe Bugner (no really) is here to introduce the number 1...

Pussycat - Mississippi
Same western themed MV on a boat, great stuff by the way.

Bristol F.2B

The latest Airfix project has nearly been completed, my Bristol F.2, which can be seen here post-varnish. Unfortunately i had a bit of a mishap later on which broke the top wing off!!! Hopefully its nothing that can't be fixed with a bit of glue.

MA Day school

Today i attended the first day school of my current Open University course (which is an MA in History of course), the day school was at the OU's HQ in Milton Keynes. This was the first time i had been there, indeed the first time i had been to MK! An interesting if slightly strange place to be sure, both the campus and MK! I of course got lost on my day to the day school (well its traditional for me, i just wonder how it is possible for someone to have such a lack of a sense of direction!)

The day school was good, though tiring, and i had a nice chat with my tutor. Unfortunately at the train was delayed coming back home due to some overhead line problems nearly Wembley (though in the end my train was only delayed 30 minutes). That meant i had time to have a surreal chat with a dopehead on the train platform, he was on the run from the police for breaking his bail conditions because he couldn't go back home because his girlfriend (who seemed also pretty drugged up) had burnt all his clothes and stabbed him. He was looking to go to Wales to hide, though got on a train for Glasgow. I think he was too high to really care one way or the other!

Firefox woes and redemption

Firefox is my favourite web browser and seems to work best with how i surf the web, so when Firefox started to develop terminal crash-itus on my work PC i was most annoyed. It remained rock solid at home on my Mac but quickly became unusable at work, crashing after 1 page load. I tried the latest version and even downgraded to version 3 after trying my best to scrub away the previous version from the hard drive but no joy, at most i gained a few hours respite.

I began to use Chrome as my main work browser which is fine though i don't really like how it works (and also does not work perfectly with the university's content management system). Then the IT department came and fixed my Firefox for me while i was away on holiday. It fixed things... well for a few days until the crashes returned. Then i disabled Flash...

Since then Firefox has worked for me nearly perfectly! I did have a couple of crashes this morning but these were the first since Monday. So it seems like it may have been the Flash plugin all along, now surfing sans Flash is a slight inconvenience (and ironic because i completed FLI Flash Introduction in the Spring!) but to be honest it is not a total loss and Chrome is always available for Flash enabled pages. HTML5 works fine of course and that is where we are going as a university in any case (and at home too, thanks to the wonderful Hype program).